Oxford City Council Draft Corporate Plan and Draft Budget 2016-20

Oxford City Council Draft Corporate Plan and Draft Budget 2016-20

The City Council’s draft Corporate Plan 2016–20 and draft Budget 2016–20 have been released for consultation. The key documents are available on this website.

We are asking residents to let us have their comments and feedback on the City Council’s main budget initiatives.

The Corporate Plan and the Budget are the City Council’s key strategic documents. The Corporate Plan sets out the links between the social and economic conditions in the city, the Council’s corporate priorities, and hence its strategic direction over the next four years. The Budget sets out how these priorities will be funded. Both documents take forward the main themes agreed by the Council in recent years.

Our corporate priorities have been developed in close association with many partners, including the business community, community organisations, the health and education sectors, and the County Council, and they reaffirm the City Council’s ambition to make Oxford a world-class city for all its citizens.

Local authorities across the country, as well as the wider public sector have, in recent years, been subject to a steady reduction in grant funding from central government, as well as facing the impact of the recession. Between 2013 and March 2016, Oxford City Council will have had its government grant reduced by around 60%. Further cuts have been signalled for future years, with grant expected to fall out by 2019-20. As a consequence, the Council has faced challenges in identifying efficiency savings and new income streams in order to protect and improve services.

Despite these challenges, the Council is still aiming to improve vital services for the people of Oxford. The Council’s policy commitment is to safeguard the vulnerable from cuts in the services that they require, to narrow the gap between rich and poor in our city and to avoid compulsory redundancies. We have been able to make progress in turning our ambition into reality because the Council is increasingly an efficient and effective organisation. Over the past four years the Council has generated approximately £10 million in efficiency savings with a further £7 million of efficiencies over the next four year Medium Term Financial Plan with major work-streams around office rationalisation, as well as staffing and ICT efficiencies. Rather than going down the route of privatisation of core services, we have been very active in selling council services to other bodies.

The outcomes from this consultation and how we have used the results can be found in the 'Consultation Report' below.